Saltation (biology)

In biology, saltation, from the Latin saltus meaning leap, describes a sudden, large mutational change between one generation and the next that can, in principle, produce a new species in a single step. The idea was proposed historically as an alternative to Darwin's model of slow, gradual evolutionary change, and it was favored by some pre-Darwinian naturalists before falling out of favor during the modern synthesis, which emphasized gradualism. More recent evidence has led to a partial reconsideration of saltational processes. The clearest known example is polyploidy in plants, which can produce a new species in what is, in evolutionary terms, a single sudden step; other proposed mechanisms include gene duplication, lateral gene transfer, and symbiogenesis, each capable of producing changes large enough to establish a new species within one generation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/